What if two of the most daring films of the New Hollywood era were never made?
Before Breathless and The Big Easy, Jim McBride burst onto the scene in 1967 with David Holzman’s Diary, establishing himself as one of the most fearless voices of the American underground, a filmmaker fascinated by the shifting boundary between truth and performance, intimacy and spectacle.
Lost Screenplays of the 1970s uncovers two remarkable unproduced works from that turbulent decade. Gone Beaver, co-written with Lorenzo Mans, is a poetic Acid Western, populated with mountain men, mystics, wanderers and lost soul, that dismantles the mythology of the American West. Intimate to the point of discomfort, My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend probes the darker mechanics of love, sex, and power. One script is mythic and expansive, the other inward and confrontational. Together they reveal the breadth of McBride’s imagination at a moment when filmmakers briefly had the freedom to chase daring personal visions.
Lost Screenplays of the 1970s reveals a fascinating and little-known chapter in the career of a major American filmmaker, and reminds us that sometimes the most astonishing films are the ones that never reach the screen. With an introduction and interview with McBride by film historian James Kenney.
Jim McBride first gained attention with the influential faux-documentary David Holzman's Diary (1967), a landmark of early independent filmmaking, and later directed the stylish neo-noir remake Breathless starring Richard Gere, The Big Easy with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin, and the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire!
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